The Best Friend of Bureaucrats

BROCK YATES

Feb 1, 2001

The nation is slowly picking itself off the mat following a presidential election that seems more likely to have taken place in some fly-blown Third World backwater than in civilization's most technologically advanced nation. But if we have learned nothing else from the zany experience, we now know that (1) we have more political pundits per capita than McDonald's has counter help (with roughly the same IQ levels) and (2) the Republic will prevail with the same collection of hacks, ward heelers, spinmeisters, perfectly coifed gangsters, and bunko artists of both major parties at the control of government.

The good news is that the sides are evenly split. Gridlock is good. A do-nothing Congress is nirvana. There is a relationship to the fact that since 1994, when the GOP seized control, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen 6000 points; whereas during the first two years of the Clinton administration, when the Democrats ran the whole affair, it rose only 600 points. There used to be a guy wandering around Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park with a sandwich board that advised, "Don't Vote-It Only Encourages Them." There may be something to the notion that the wealth and prosperity of the nation operates in inverse proportion to the meddling in Washington.

While a good case can be made for the oft-repeated contention that the least government is the best government, we still face another menace: the legions of faceless, paper-shuffling, directive-issuing, rules-making busybodies called bureaucrats. These so-called civil servants operate beyond the direct control of legislatures, executive branches, and courts, often creating their own laws and regulations in direct contravention to the people's wishes.

For example, if you happen to be traveling on the George Washington Memorial Parkway in and around Washington, D.C., you will discover that the speed limit is 40 mph but the 85th percentile speed is 57 mph. You may also be the lucky winner of a photo-radar speeding ticket.

Two of these invasive photo units have recently been installed by the National Park Service, with no realistic mandate for reducing accidents. There being no congressional review or approval for the use of photo radar or any unmanned speed enforcement of any kind, these units have caused a flurry of complaints among the driving public and by some members of Congress, including Republican majority leader Dick Armey.

Their ire centers not only on the philosophical issue of unauthorized government snooping but also on the reality that accidents have steadily declined on the 447-mile federal parkway network in the capital district as speeds have increased well beyond the universally ignored 40-mph limit. According to the Park Service's own statistics, high speed is a factor in only 10 percent of the accidents on highway sections now being monitored by photo radar.

Moreover, there are statistics indicating that heavier enforcement not only fails to reduce accidents but in fact may increase them. In 1997, the U.S. Park Police issued 11,441 speeding citations and investigated seven fatal accidents. Last year, in 1999, speeding tickets dropped to 7996 issued, while the Parkway experienced one death. This tracks with other studies indicating that the greater the speed enforcement, the greater the chance for accidents (because motorists tend to watch for cops and eye their speedometers rather than the road). Yet even in the face of this evidence, the Park Service bureaucrats persist with their photo-radar scheme based on a joint effort with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration called "the automated speed enforcement demonstration project." You will recall NHTSA as the sharp-eyed watchdogs who were among the last to discover that three brands of Firestone SUV radials were failing at inordinately high rates. They had to be informed by the media, consumer groups, industry leaders, and other concerned citizens regarding the problem. Now NHTSA has seized on this new speed-enforcement idea with the National Park Service, an arm of the federal bureaucracy better suited to controlling campfires in Yellowstone and mowing the grass around Gettysburg monuments than to dealing with traffic-safety issues.